Jessica Scott | The Grand rapids PressDave Oostindie, of the Wyoming Clean Water Plant, pushes his cart with bins carrying discarded medical prescriptions during a pick-up from the Family Fare pharmacy in Rogers Plaza in Wyoming. The water plant runs a prescription drug disposal program to avoid people dumping prescription drugs into sewers.

WYOMING -- A city program that soon might expand across the region already has collected more than 1,200 pounds of unused medicine.

Next month, the new Wyoming Medicinal Disposal Service, or WyMeDS, will be honored for its environmental protection efforts.

The initiative is keeping medicinal compounds out of the city's wastewater plant and, by extension, local waterways. And, at a cost of $73 per incineration, the program has the potential for a massive long-term public cost benefit, supporters say.

"It's the next big thing that we think we're going to have to deal with on a regulatory level, and we're trying to get ahead of it," said Dave Oostindie, Wyoming's environmental services supervisor. "Plants like this aren't designed to remove things like that.

"The investment in a treatment process for handling some of these compounds is going to be huge. Since we can detect (the medicine level), and we know where it's coming from, we feel we can do something about it."

Bravo, says the state Department of Natural Resources and Environment, which will honor Wyoming on July 28 as one of its 2009 Neighborhood Environmental Partners. Herman Miller, Mel Trotter Ministries and Pilgrim Manor also will be given awards.

WyMeDS, which began late last year, works with area pharmacies to collect unused, unwanted or expired medicine. For controlled substances such as Vicodin, a collection box has been installed at the Wyoming Police Department, 2300 DeHoop Ave. SW.

The goal is to keep the drugs, which get destroyed at Kent County's incinerator, out of the landfill and away from the city's wastewater treatment plant. More than 20 local pharmacies participate.

"We get questions from customers all the time about what to do with stuff in their medicine cabinet," said Eddie Garcia, director of pharmacy for Spartan Stores. "It's a value-added service we provide. It helps answer questions that we couldn't answer before."

The county now is working to expand the WyMeDS concept to Grand Rapids, Cedar Springs, Lowell, Plainfield Township and other communities that have their own wastewater plants, including those outside Kent.

Collection boxes are being delivered to law enforcement agencies countywide and a Web site is being developed to detail disposal procedures, said Douglas G. Wood, the county's public works director.

"A big thing that we want to focus on is education," he said. "If you do put (medicine) in the landfill or you do put it in the toilet, it's going to get into our streams and rivers and lakes.

"Sitting in a landfill's probably not the best place for it."

The state award honors Wyoming for going "above and beyond" in its own community and for extending the concept into the broader area, said Robert McCann, DNRE spokesman.

"It recognizes that they have gone out of their way to work with the community and show that these kinds of ideas are not something impossible to achieve," he said. "In fact, they can kind of go hand in hand with your normal operations and, a lot of times, end up saving money."